Traveler Types

Nifty little article from Slate trying to catalog the different various people you might meet during a flight delay. Which is a useful thing in these ashy volcano threatened days. The first one is often on the other side of my phone at work:

Outside Flight Ninja
Responds to a delay by immediately calling his or her travel agent or assistant and plotting routes around the problem. Is there a train station near by? What's the drive time to the nearest airport, if I rent a car? These people walk away from other travelers so their solution won't be copied. They know the tricks of the major airports and departure times of alternate flights by heart.

Sadly, we travel agents don't have a lot of good info for them. In a fluid situation with flight cancellations (weather, closed airports, mechanical problems) our booking systems don't really keep up well. The airlines just don't update the schedules that quickly.
So what do we do? Go online. The FAA has a good site for airport delays. Google Maps is a godsend for finding hotels near a given location. Speaking of Google, a neat trick that we just recently learned for flight status is to type in the airline code and flight number and do a search. The first result is usually your flight.
We still can't do much about mechanical problems. The best bet there is to stay calm, listen to what the airline tells you and be nice to the gate agents. Remember, they can make or break your day. Act accordingly.